Residual Touch of a City

A short visit can never produce a complete understanding of a place. Instead you receive fragments of a subjective encounter. Arising from a desire to document my travels, my intention for this project is to lean into the distorted, personal perspectives of the cities I visit. A perspective that is rendered by my body. How does the city’s ambiance, atmosphere, and energy make me feel? What impressions are left by moving through its spaces? I am interested in the overlooked material details that shape these experiences. 

I carry around a roll of clear tape on my wrist. During my walks through the city I collect pieces of disintegrating posters, flyers, dust, moss from stones, textures from buildings, fingerprints, and the dirt from the soles of my shoes. The adhesive surface grabs these residual fragments and turns them into relics of the city. The tape became my prosthetic skin, touching the city on my behalf and carrying away tactile memories. I then put the tape pieces together with text I write about my visit. I placed the tape collage on top of photo-paper in the darkroom and expose it. The collage functions like a negative to create a portrait of the city from its physical pieces. This step acts to merge all the fragments into a unified whole.  Negatives of the city are exposed through the collage, layering a more conventional representation of the city with its physical mirror image. 

In the end the series documents my visit while challenging and leaning into photography’s traditionally ocularcentric mode of perception. I was inspired by ideas in The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses and the index in semiotics, helping me think about how physical aspects can shape how you perceive and depict a city.